[saurik]

Ok, if we are going to start using that "mark as spam" button to punish people, maybe then I should go sign up for your comms.io "tell me when the product is ready" mailing list using a bunch of Hotmail and Gmail accounts, and mark your messages spam on all of them when I receive them.

I mean, if we are going to use that button to feel "satisfied" by punishing others whose business practices we or actions we disagree with, rather than to actually mark, you know, actual spam that we shouldn't have received in the first place, why not include some old fashioned tit-for-tat, right?

Seriously: you are abusing the right to be part of a collective spam filter by interpreting the rules of that law in that way. You aren't even doing it in a way that other users of that spam filter are going to obviously appreciate: a lot of people (heaven forbid) actually like receiving the email we sign up for.

[rvkennedy]

Have I "abused" your internal mental rules of email behaviour? I don't care. Perhaps it's analogous the way that you have abused the downvote feature on HN to express your disagreement with my point, but I think I have more justification.

Actually, spammy behaviour by "legitimate" senders should be punished, and they will get the message. Unsubscribe should be one-click - email users have enough on their plates already, and if I have done something, however small, to improve the behaviour of mailers, I feel great about that.

[saurik]

"Downvoting has always been used to express disagreement." -- pg [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347].

Regardless, I happily admit to having personally downvoted your comment (although I think I accidentally upvoted your response to dubcanada :() under any set of rules: your comment expressed, not just matter-of-factly, but with a sort of vindictive glee, that you were happy to interpret that law however you wanted, and then use a vaguely related collaborative system to enact your personal punishment on others, despite how other people using that system may feel.

In so doing, your comment didn't address either of the points made by its parent: 1) that that seems to be a narrow definition and 2) that major providers seem to believe that this is fine, and they are large enough to probably know what they are doing. If anything, your comment admits that it is wrong, but that it somehow more personally satisfying to do the thing you want to do regardless. If I can't downvote you for that, I'm not certain why we have downvotes at all ;P.

> Actually, spammy behaviour by "legitimate" senders should be punished, and they will get the message.

The situation here is not "spammy behavior". Even if the behavior in question violated that law (which it does not seem to), that still wouldn't make the result "spam". When you combine this with your interpretation of that law being somewhat fringe, using the word "spam" here loses meaning.

> Unsubscribe should be one-click - email users have enough on their plates already, and if I have done something, however small, to improve the behaviour of mailers, I feel great about that.

Even if you believe that "encourage behavior" is a legitimate usage of the shared spam filter you are participating in, you have to realize that the behavior you are thereby trying to encourage is really problematic: it's like encouraging websites to just tell anyone your password when they click the "I forgot my password" button.

The various threads on this post have demonstrated multiple cases, some malicious, some benign--and even some from people who claim to be benign but don't pass the "would the person I'm doing this to consider it malicious" test--as to why "click link with no verification of any kind" should not instantly unsubscribe you from these mailing lists.

Moving further into "even if": even if (and I maintain that this is just wrong) you decide "spam filters should be used to determine whether people are in compliance with the CAN SPAM Act", the law states you are actually allowed to have interfaces that include "menus" as part of the opt-out to determine what should be opted out of (as you may want to continue receiving some e-mail, but not things like that).

Meanwhile, the law seems perfectly happy to not even require a link at all: you are actually allowed to require the user to send you a message in reply asking to be removed (in reality, it doesn't even mention having a website at all). Further, the law actually states you can continue to receive mail for 30 days after you initiate the opt-out.

Honestly, in a perfect world, it would seem to be that no e-mail would ever contain an unsubscribe link, and would tell the user "if you want to unsubscribe, reply to this e-mail and tell us you want to be unsubscribed"; there are ways (involving usage of e-mail headers that affect the reply to and return paths) to make forwarding the e-mail then safe against benign mistakes made by friends, and fairly secure against malicious attacks made by people you forward the e-mail, in ways that the link are not (as evidenced by the premise of this article).

[rvkennedy]

> "Downvoting has always been used to express disagreement." -- pg [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347].

As I can find no reference to this in the guidelines, I guess this unofficial statement is the best we will get. Not a good policy - it's non-standard, and encourages the wrong kind of behaviour, but in the case of HN I will concede the point.

> that you were happy to interpret that law however you wanted

I am not interpreting any law. What someone does with their own mail client is between them and their provider - and that's in the cases where marking as spam is even sent to the provider, which is not the standard behaviour.

> if you decide "spam filters should be used to determine whether people are in compliance with the CAN SPAM Act", the law states you are actually allowed to have interfaces that include "menus" as part of the opt-out to determine what should be opted out of (as you may want to continue receiving some e-mail, but not things like that).

You seem to imagine that "spam" is purely a legal definition because there exists an act of congress that seeks to limit it. The term long predates the act, and the capabilities we have developed to fight it do not depend on the specifics of US law. Do I, or any regular mail user, care that the law allows menus? No, make us jump through hoops and we get mad. Or "gleefully vindictive", if you're feeling fragile.

> the law actually states you can continue to receive mail for 30 days after you initiate the opt-out.

Which is why we do not rely on that particular law in the fight against spam.

But in fact, for most mail users actual spam is not a big problem. Gmail has great filters for example, and very rarely do most power users need to trawl through their spam folder for mis-filed messages. For most users, spammy behaviour by "legitimate" senders is much more pressing. If people really love your content, one-click unsubscribe is not going to keep them from it. If you put obstacles in the way of unsubscription, if you make it easier for them to mark you as spam (or filter you out, whatever), they will do so. My time, and the time spent by millions of mail users, is worth something, and is not to be wasted by mass-mailers' borderline behaviour.

So if you are one of these, I suggest you to give serious consideration to the hard-pressed user's experience of email.

[saurik]

> As I can find no reference to this in the guidelines, I guess this unofficial statement is the best we will get. Not a good policy - it's non-standard, and encourages the wrong kind of behaviour, but in the case of HN I will concede the point.

This is actually the same problem in another setting: the downvote has a kind of meaning, and you disagree with it; if you don't use the downvote in the way that everyone else does, your data damages the results for everyone else.

> You seem to imagine that "spam" is purely a legal definition because there exists an act of congress that seeks to limit it.

No, in fact, I maintain that the CAN-SPAM act does not define "spam" (in fact, I believe it explicitly said it would refuse to define "spam"), and that thereby failure to address the rules of that law (which is how this thread was born) also does not define spam. You thereby cannot claim that things related to that law (or even your personal stretching of that law) define "spammy behavior".

> Do I, or any regular mail user, care that the law allows menus? No, make us jump through hoops and we get mad. Or "gleefully vindictive", if you're feeling fragile.

If you really don't want to receive their mail, you should add them to your kill file. Hell: if you didn't want to receive their mail in the first place, maybe you shouldn't have signed up for it ;P. (Remember: the laws on this matter don't apply to people who are contacting you out of the blue with no prior business relationship. If someone is doing that, they they are outside of the scope of this entire conversation, and in fact are probably "spam" no matter how their unsubscribe links are implemented.)

> Gmail has great filters for example, and very rarely do most power users need to trawl through their spam folder for mis-filed messages. For most users, spammy behaviour by "legitimate" senders is much more pressing.

Gmail only has great filters until enough people like you ruin their data set by including things that are not spam into the list of things that are spam.

> For most users, spammy behaviour by "legitimate" senders is much more pressing.

No. This seems to be the position of a rather small minority of people who get really really angry on public forums about how e-mail is implemented. The majority of people you see talk about spam and the problems of spam claim that the issue is that if their e-mail address becomes at all public (such as on a mailing list, where you should expect it to be public), they suddenly start receiving large quantities of e-mail from random senders or even pretending to be their friends, neither of which can be stopped with a kill file (the correct solution if you personally just hate one specific company).

> If people really love your content, one-click unsubscribe is not going to keep them from it. If you put obstacles in the way of unsubscription, if you make it easier for them to mark you as spam (or filter you out, whatever), they will do so.

I don't send e-mail to anyone except for password resets, so you have shifted the argument. I am claiming that as a receiver of mail, I don't want people like you screwing with the spam filter to make totally legitimate mail, mail that even includes unsubscribe links that are in perfect compliance with the laws that many people argued over having, mail that I asked for and wanted to receive and would be sad that I don't, accidentally end up not being sent to me because I forwarded it to my friend Pat, and he accidentally (or purposely) clicked the unsubscribe link: that is a security issue, and should be addressed as one.